In class on Tuesday, we talked about what makes a university prestigious. Possibilities mentioned in class were the age of a university, or its acceptance rate. Though these factors are often associated with universities that are undeniably prestigious, they are not what caused this prestige. These factors can only be explained as signs of prestige. A university that is unanimously recognized as being prestigious will undoubtedly be faced with a flood of applicants, of which they will only be able to accept a small percentage, thus leading to this low acceptance rate. With this huge applicant pool, and a successful history of teaching higher education, the university will have no problem staying in business for an extended period of time, leading to its age.
So then, what does make a university prestigious? Quite simply, a university gathers prestige when it is known for successfully educating its students. Though a university makes itself known in many different ways, it does so primarily when its students find success after they graduate. Employers quickly take notice when new employees from one institution are more productive than those of another. People take notice of what universities important political figures attended, which further increases (or sometimes decreases) the universities “prestige.”
Thelin’s A History of American Higher Education contains a list of universities that were part of the Association of American Universities in 1900 that contained such universities as Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Stanford, Penn, Princeton and Yale (Thelin, 110). The Association of American Universities was the first effort to truly define institutions as universities (Thelin, 110). This list is frighteningly similar to a list one would make today of the seven most prestigious universities in the country, which would suggest that age gives a university prestige. History raises and is necessary for a university’s prestige, but only if it is a history of successes. Evidence of this is that many universities on Thelin’s list do not have a great deal of prestige today because they did not deliver the level of education that was needed to gather this kind of prestige.
While I am no employer, I don't think one can mostly attribute prestige to how well alumni from a certain school perform in "the real world". Today, a lot of this "prestige" has to do with college rankings. These rankings sought to compare universities and give an "objective" view to see how universities compared with each other. Of course, the forefront of this is the U.S. News America's Best Colleges. This has created competition between colleges that has sometimes fiercely sought to "up their numbers". From my college application days I remember a phenomenon termed "Tufts Syndrome". Basically, Tufts University would reject students who were overly qualified because they thought these students would be accepted to Ivy League universities or comparable universities and turn down the Tufts offer. This in turn would affect their yield and thus their ranking in U.S. News. While not everyone looks at U.S. News rankings, it is a major factor for some parents and students when starting the college search. What better way to see which college is the best for little Bobby than college rankings ? Even Trinity University constantly advertises that it is "The Best in the West" for the last eighteen years or so. Even when one enters the Trinity University website one is flashed with messages promoting how well Trinity is ranked. Rankings and prestige go hand in hand, so well established schools like Yale,Stanford, Williams, Amherst do not have their excellent rankings flashing on the main university website. People already know these are good schools and they don't have to blatantly promote that. Other schools are still trying to build their reputation and have to resort to promoting rankings. Which these in turns will hopefully build up prestige.
ReplyDeletePhil and Daniel's remarks make me wonder: is prestige (age/ranking/name) more an issue of earning money for an institution (either through fundraising to increase the school's endowment or through attracting more students who will pay tuition, fees, etc.) and less to do with the quality of the education itself? Or might there be a less direct relationship between a school's prestige and the education it affords? For instance, if a school has prestige and therefore earns more money, then perhaps the students' quality of education rises because of the greater resources available to them on/through the campus. I wonder if there are "prestigious" schools out there where the quality of education is not necessarily correlative to perceptions of its standing . . .
ReplyDeletePhil's comments also bring up that inevitable question of what constitutes student "success"--is it job marketability? Level and/or breadth of particular skills? Preparation for the "real world" (however one defines that term)? General learning outcomes (e.g., mastery of a specific set of knowledge or field of inquiry)?